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Thursday, February 15, 2007

Lo Galluccio’s “Poems For Dave Tronzo” is a small, self-published chapbook containing nine poems. (There is no price listed on the book.) The no-frills design, the typeface and its spatial relation to the page give the poems a sense of intimacy and immediacy even before reading. The line lengths vary in the poems, some lines ranging five to seven beats, some four or less. Galluccio lets the content give form to the poems, which adds visual as well as poetic spice to the book.It would be helpful to the general reader if there were a title page with some mention of who Dave Tronzo is (an acclaimed New York-based guitarist known especially for his slide work, hence the cover photo) and perhaps why the book was “for” him. Beyond this minor quibble, this reviewer found the poems bursting with arresting imagery. From “The Color of January” we find:

Sometimes you say I’m a hot hot star in your bed. “What color wouldyou like me to be?” you ask. I say, “Blue.”

Galluccio’s images and language suggest a vision of poetry that is Rimbaudian and Orphic. She pushes her language. The language takes risky leaps, pushing off like a ballerina performing a tours en l’air and landing like a kung-fu fighter inches from your face.Here are the first three stanzas of “Itinerary”:

Past castles in Brabant. Thirsty I drink a sweet dream of union.My horse, a thief

In Gent. Pale fish serve as my communion. As symbolsgo in eyes streaming where they went.

A hell topless and civilized extremely like Paris,a cabdriver screws off his head.

Like I said, Rimbaudian; the imagery is surreal, dreamlike and haunting, as in “A Terror In Spring”:

I believed in silence but youKept opening up my mouth.When your tongue finished foraging,Words fell out like old shoes.These words put tracks on yourBack.

The poem ends with these tasty lines:

Levitation is not the same as resurrection.

It takes faith.

I’m nobody,and I use a pen.

This reviewer particular enjoyed “Your Amsterdam”, a poem more compact but no less charged by elevated language. Here it is in full:

I think I thoughtI lived thereIn a courtyard with pinkFlush egg lightsWhere birdsErupt at looping

Barbed wire

And finding youat a table—alabaster facerisen over a grey bowlsteaming—

My penitent kissto your forehead

gets pierced.

“Poems For Dave Tronzo” is a chapbook to savor. To cop a line from the speaker of “Three Dollar Poem,” you will come back and say yes, baby, yes.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

An Essay by Donald Lev about his late wife the poet Enid Dame(Enid Dame)This essay is by Donald Lev who is the publisher of the New York-based independent literary review: "The Home Planet News." Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and The New York Times and drove a cab for twenty years. He also ran messages for and contributed poetry to The Village Voice. Donald also operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the lower east side, and, in 1969, reached the pinnacle of his underground film career with his portrayal of "the poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s classic, "Putney Swope." Currently, Donald lives with his reclusive cat, Kit Smart, in High Falls New York, continuing to publish and edit the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife, Enid Dame, founded in 1979

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF ENID DAMEby Donald Lev

I first met Enid (who was my companion, wife, and colleague for 25 years) through some poems she sent to the New York Poets' Cooperative--it could have been as early as 1975, but more likely 1976 (my sense of chronology is as weak as my sense of direction). The Co-op started in ’69 as an organization that promoted readings—at that period you couldn’t get more than five minutes anywhere in NYC to present your work orally unless you kissed ass at one of two holy edifices—St. Marks in the Bouwerie or the Ninetysecond Street Y. I thought, what is this? Who is this? Does she really spell her last name with an m not an n? Does she either not know what she’s doing or does the sober but funny magic of those unusual poems come from a genuine ability and authority. I guessed the latter and voted with the majority (I believe it was unanimous) to welcome her into membership. One of the poems, “Before,” which subsequently appeared in her first Downtown Poets chapbook Between Revolutions began:

The catshit reproaches me in the bathroom.The icebox has regressed:incontinent, it leaksand puddles on the floor.The drain’s in pain again.It vomits when I do the dishes.The dishes crack.

We’re all of usa bit unwell.

I finally got to meet Enid Dame at a meeting of the New York Poets’ Cooperative. And I came to appreciate her cool literary and political intelligence as well as her inner warmth, honesty, and humor. We soon became friends and allies in some of the controversies rife in the organization (of which I recall nothing now—which fact at least reveals how petty they must have been). When,.in 1978, Mike Devlin and I were beginning to produce issues of Poets Monthly out of Mike’s strategic office in Union Square, I suggested to Mike that we needed a good, organized, literary-minded person to center the enterprise. He agreed. So I got Enid, who at that time was looking for an excuse to lay off her doctoral dissertation for a while (she eventually finished it and became a fully exploitable member of Academia) to take on the task with the title of “associate editor.” But before that time Enid and I met in connection with two other interesting New York City literary institutions of the time: The Print Center and the Downtown Poets Cooperative.The Print Center, in Brooklyn, was where all the small press publishers went in the ‘70s and ‘80s to put their chapbooks and other publications together. Any work you could do yourself, say saddle stitching, trimming, or even typesetting on one of their fine IBM Composers, you did yourself, without any cost to you. And anything the Print Center did for you—which was printing for the most part—was done at very reasonable rates—thanks to NYSCA and NEA funding. The operation was run by poets. When I first dealt with the Print Center—I notice my third book of poems, copyright 1973 was done there—it was located in a little storefront on State Street. The manager was a pleasant chap named George Faust. All the work was done by the long-suffering Larry Zirlin. By 1975 the Print Center was occupying the first of two similar spaces—large commercial lofts in downtown Brooklyn, near the BQE and the waterfront. In these new locations the manager became Robert Hershon (of Hanging Loose fame); and of course the long-suffering Larry Zirlin was on hand to do all the work. At some point the long-suffering Larry Zirlin was replaced by the uncomplaining Frank Murphy, who also printed the New York Poetry Calendar, which I came to distribute for about fifteen years. (Hershon currently runs something called the Print Center out of offices in Manhattan, which is a much different animal from its predecessor). Among the many many small presses (those were the days when we were a truly powerful movement) that enjoyed the benefits of the Print Center was the Downtown Poets’ Coop. headed by David and Phillis Gershator, two excellent writers and poets themselves, who managed on grants, which were much more plentiful those days, to publish several books and chapbooks. The Downtown authors whose names are most recognizable today were Ivan Arguelles, Irving Stettner, and Enid Dame.Enid’s two Downtown Poets chapbooks, Between Revolutions (named “one of the half dozen best of the year” 1977 by Bill Katz of the Library Journal) and Interesting Times (1978), both well printed and illustrated with interesting collages and photographs by her husband of the time, Robin Dame (who, changed in name and gender, is still a good friend and important member of the Home Planet News editorial staff), consists of poems reflecting a period of Enid’s life when she was coming off a long hiatus during which poetry had been replaced by politics (she was a member of that section of SDS which did not use drugs or play with bombs, but also did not get to write the histories of the movement). Now, having left the party which denounced her as a “Bourgeoise Individualist” and moved with husband and cats to Brooklyn, she began writing the funny, sad, nostalgic poems that appear in these books—all soaked in a marinade of place, politics, and Jewish ethnicity.

four days a weekI managethe streets, the terrible subwaysthe human explosionsskirting disastersbetween revolutions

Enid’s next book, also from Downtown Poets, was a full collection called On the Road to Damascus, Maryland (1980), which included two types of poems not to be found in the chapbooks: family poems (of which the only example in this particular volume is the title poem), and what Enid was later to call “midrashic poetry”—poems concerned with biblical characters and stories with a view to fill in the blank spaces and answer questions raised in the scriptural narratives. This latter category fills most of the second half of the book in a section called “Traveling Companions.” Here is the first appearance in print of Enid Dame’s signature poem, “Lilith”:

Kicked myself out of paradiseleft a hole in the morningno note no goodbye

the man I lived withwas patient and hairy

he cared for the animalsworked late at nightplanting vegetablesunder the moon…

Taking hints from a 1972 article by Lilly Rivlin in Ms and Susan Sherman’s poem “Lilith of the Wildwood, of the Fair Places,” which was first printed in 1971 (both pieces are reprinted in Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman (Jason Aronson. 1998), an anthology edited by Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henny Wenkart), Enid converted Lilith from the Judaeo-Christian Demon to a perennial hip Jewish feminist with some sisterly connections to Mae West and Sadie Thompson.

One transitional poem did appear in Enid’s chapbook, Interesting Times. This is “Vildeh Chaya” which she pointed out in her article “Art as Midrash” (published posthumously in Home Planet News #53) was “(a) pivotal poem for me…(n)ot exactly a midrash since there is no such character as Vildeh Chaya in Jewish text. I invented her—a wild Jewish woman—because of a misunderstanding on the part of my mother (who) thought this Yiddish expression actually referred to an archetypal shtetl character—wild Chaya.”

Vildeh Chayain the woods on the edgeof the shtetl she hidesmud-splattered dress tornbarefoot she won’tpeel potatoes get marriedcut her hair off have childrenkeep the milk dishesseparatefrom the meat dishes

Midrashic poetry is featured also in all of Enid Dame’s subsequent books. Her chapbook Lilith & Her Demons (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1986) and her last book, Stone Shekhina (Three Mile Harbor, 2002) were wholly midrashic in content. In Confessions, an earlier chapbook (1982) from Cross-Cultural Communications, she joins the midrashic “Lot’s Daughter” with two other dramatic monologues (almost all of her midrashic poems were dramatic monologues) featuring Martha Scott, a victim of the Salem witch trials, and Adah Isaacs Mencken, a mid-nineteenth-century American (probably Jewish) poet, actress and femme fatale. Her 1992 collection, Anything You Don’t See (West End Press) is the most comprehensive to date (I have been putting together two posthumous collections, one of which should be out soon from Three Mile Harbor) in that it gives the reader a fine sampling of Enid’s entire oevre. including midrashic and family poems, poems of place, and poems of politics; and contains good examples of the sestina and the dramatic monologue, forms of poetry in which she particularly excelled.Poems in Anything You Don’t See catalogue Enid’s family history from her birth in Beaver Falls, a small mill town in western Pennsylvania

The walls shook, and I broke into the world,skidded into a bedrail and found my voicein the summer hospital room, in the quiet milltown.Mother shuddered, “I think it’s already happened.”“Impossible!” Father insisted. “It’s still too early.”The doctor, meanwhile, was out fishing. …(“Birthday”)

to politically progressive parents who met at a labor rally in Washington, D.C. when they were young government workers during the New Deal ‘thirties who suddenly removed to Pennsylvania where her father (originally from The Bronx) became a furniture salesman (introduced into that calling by his father-in-law); to the city of Pittsburgh, where Enid spent her early teens, and her Indiana-born mother—who suffered from depression, and, later, from multiple sclerosis—painted.

In Mother’s city, there are no doorknobs.Someone has pulled up the trees.In this Pittsburgh, the sky is yellow,oilspilled, streaky. The color of despair.Telephone poles throw up hands,gawky crosses, then fall over backward.No wires. No birds. Here,everything is inside.(”Mother’s City”)

In Pittsburgh Enid started high school—which had a writer’s club. Then the family (which by now also included her younger brother Phil Jacobs—currently editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times) moved to Baltimore where there was no writer’s club. So Enid joined the gun club. Thence to Towson State Teacher’s College (now University) where she published poems in the Talisman (Towson’s literary magazine), got involved with the science fiction “fanzine” movement, where she met her first husband, married, got involved with the Baltimore peace movement, graduated, taught high school; then dumped it all, “caught the red-eye to New York/ reading “America” in the City Lights Edition,/ ecstatic on no sleep and bursts of fantasy…” (“The Seders”, published in the Woodstock Journal).The city Enid loved so passionately is celebrated even more strongly than in the previous volumes in Anything You Don’t See. Consider such classics as “Brighton Beach” (“…a place of immigrants, radicals, exiles,/ serious eaters and various gifts…”) and “Riding the D-Train”:

Notice the rooftops,the wormeaten Brooklyn buildings.Houses crawl by,each with its private legend.In one, a motheris punishing her childslowly, with great enjoyment.In one, a daughteris writing a novelshe can’t show to anyone. …

In this volume also, her powerful sestinas begin to appear: “My Father and the Brooklyn Bridge,” “Sestina for Michael,” and “Ethel Rosenberg: A Sestina”:

I picture you in your three-room apartment, a womansinging snatches of arias to yourself as you set the table,loving and hating the house. I know the type.Scraping and rearranging, refusing to take things easy,Foreboding washes over you, an extra sense.

Dramatic monologues are here in abundance. Besides the midrashic Lot and Eve, we are addressed in the voices of Cinderella, Persephone, and citizens of Brighton Beach like the persona of “Closing Down: Old Woman on Boardwalk”:

Still holding on in this body,an old house;One by one they’re sealing its rooms off.Heat’s disappearinglike ghosts through the cracks.

In the last section of the book, Enid celebrates her parents’ lives and deaths in several haunting poems.

Now hold your motherlingeringly on your tongue.Her fruit is still alive.It tastes as it always did:heavy resonant edgy.It makes you think of old coatsfur collared camphor-scentedworn in another country.(“Fruit Cellar”}

In the elegant “God’s Lioness,” also in Anything You Don’t See, Enid Dame addresses one of her great models, Sylvia Plath:

Art can do just so much—it can’t save you.

These lines move me to reflect on Enid Dame’s late poems, haunted by cancer, 9/11, and impending war. This from an unpublished poem, “Bulbs”:

You gave me six daffodil bulbsto plant in my upstate front yard,letting each one stand for an unrescued nameentombed in the Tower wreckage.

I carried the box to my mountain,set to work with a shovel.It proved slow going,that ungiving October day.

One of the bulbs had split:two bodies joined at the stem.I thought of those mythic co-workerswho held hands before they jumped.…I thought: I’m burying six peopleI probably never knew,their bodies unfound their names amputated.All we’ll have is six flowers

if they actually bloom next spring,if we’re here to see, to remember.

Those daffodils have been blooming ever since, more profusely each spring. The theme of remembering became important in these last (perhaps Anthroposophy-influenced) poems. In “Catskill Mountain Book Fair: May 2003” (published in Heliotrope) she begins:

Remember it all.It won’t be here next year.

Woman poet in red velvet blouse on stage.Grand piano (covered like a toaster) behind her.Pieces of quilt on the walls.Publishers listening at their booths.Backdrop: a road climbing a mountain,trees slowly finding their green,an apple tree in frail flower.

You reach for a hand.It is here this year.It feels warm and comfortable. You handle itwhile the poems’ rhythms gently rock the room.This is a pleasure. You will needto remember it later. …

In emulation of another great role model, especially during the last year of her life, the Mexican painter and political activist Frieda Kahlo, Enid participated in peace demonstrations and recorded what it felt like to be in those moments in poems like her villanelle, “The War Moves Closer,” printed posthumously in both Home Planet News and the “Beat Bush” issue of Long Shot:

The war moves closer and we can’t stop it.Four million marched in Rome and London.We read our poems on a Woodstock stage.Winter goes on forever.

Four million marched in Rome and London.A few lay down in the snow in Antarctica.Winter goes on forever. …

and the monumental “This One,” also published posthumously, in Tikkun:

The first one wasn’t real.But I opposed it.I opposed it in a workshirt.I opposed it in a mini-skirt.I opposed it on my way to buy birth-control pills.I oppposed it ecstatically.I opposed it in my kitchen bathtubon the Lower East Side.I opposed it on the streets with my friendswho were scruffy and raucous and funny,who opposed it with their youth and great bodies.…This one is different.We’ve lost so much already:a citya democracya way to be togethera fantasy of hope(which glimmered like a silver-misted islandat the edge of possibility).

Now it’s hard to see that islandthrough the thickening smoke.…An awful force is gathering.It’s real. It’s getting stronger.It doesn’t mean us well.

But I’ll oppose itWith my smoke-clogged brain.I’ll oppose it with a stone in my breast…

On December 3, 2003, during a bitter, unseasonable, cold spell, Enid flew out to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to read at a fundraiser for the Jewish feminist journal Bridges, of which she had been a poetry editor. She died of pneumonia and complications from breast cancer three weeks later, on Christmas day.I’m going to conclude here. Not that there isn’t more to say. This has been little more than a brisk survey covering the small part of Enid Dame’s work included in the seven books and chapbooks published during her lifetime. I have said nothing of her fiction, which included one completed unpublished novel, and many short stories, including parts of the novel, which appeared in small press periodicals and anthologies over many years. I have said little of her editorial work on three periodicals and an important anthology; the readings column, for instance, which she developed in Poets and Home Planet News; nor have I spoken much of her scholarship, which included writings on Victorian literature, Jewish-American fiction, and of course midrashic poetry and Jewish feminism. Besides her work on Which Lilith? noted above, she wrote papers, gave lectures and presentations of her own and other women’s work, and at the time of her death was working on a second anthology, this one of writings on the Prophetess Miriam. This project will reach some fruition in a forthcoming issue of Bridges.Hundreds of notebooks attest to Enid’s serious life-long reflections on, and struggles with, poetry, teaching (which she took very seriously), politics, history, Jewish-American literature and religion, and, finally, cancer, and the meaning of life. This little essay is meant to break some ice over deep, deep water.#

Monday, February 12, 2007

John Amen the founder of the award-winning literary bimonthly “The Pedestal,” sent me a collection of his poetry “More of Me Disappears.” This is original work; sometimes narrative, other times abstract flashes, peppered with striking lines that blink like neon, and then disappear into the ether. “Angelica Tells Her Story” reminds me of Tennessee Williams’ mad sister that Williams was haunted by his whole life. Here Amen mourns for a sister, a family, and recites a litany of sorrows:

“Oh Marta, I suffered until laughter crawled/ up the birth canal of my heart and cried its lungs awake. / I grieve for my sister chained to the storm in her gray pulp; / my mother who died looking out a window,”

In “New York Memory $14” the poet looks back and sees a sad/sweet November in a long-ago New York – a sort of womb-like respite far from the maddening crowd:

“I walked down court street in the evenings, sat on/ the Promenade sometimes./ My father was dead,/ we were first married, and I wasn’t happy, but/ maybe things seemed all right…/ In a department/ store near St. Mark’s, we decided to have a baby./ Nothing was ever enough./ But I don’t recall it/ as a bad time, that November, that sad month,/ kind of like each day was a bizarre vacation,/ a slow parade of hours leading us toward/ the hysteria of a work day, our usual lives.”

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Manisha Roy is a Bengali who was born in Northeast Assam, India, and educated in Calcutta, as well as at the University of Chicago, and the University of California. Once an anthropologist, she is now a lecturer and writer in Jungian psychotherapy. She has been a practicing psychotherapist since 1985 in Boston. She is the author of “Bengali Women,” “Cast the First Stone: Ethics in Analytic Practice,” and other works. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: How does Jungian psychotherapy differ from Freudian or Cognitive?

Manisha Roy: I will see if I can simplify it. Jung was a student of Freud and they were very close initially. At some point they separated from each other over theory, or an issue. Jung noticed in working with psychotics that they had a fantasy world they went into that had symbols and contents that sometimes are identical with certain cultural histories, legends and stories of far away cultures. This made him wonder if old humanity and young humanity had some sort of connection in the deeper level of the unconscious. So he came up with the term “collective unconscious” and he talked to Freud about it when they both traveled to this country in the early 1900’s. (Notably to Clark University in Worcester, Mass.) Freud could not agree with his theory.

Jung was like a son to him. He was looking to pass on his legacy to Jung. But Jung could not deal with it; he had to be on his own. All sons have to separate from their fathers. He broke away.

A Jungian psychotherapist pays attention to the deeper unconscious symbolism through dreams, fantasies, and neurosis. Freudians look at symbolism more or less in a standard way. Jung’s approach to the unconscious was more refreshing, healing and positive. It was not like Freudian theory that stipulated that the ego had to be constantly on guard against a cauldron of unconscious material; that could be destructive. There is a big difference philosophically between the two.

Doug Holder: How is Jungian psychotherapy received in more traditional settings like, say McLean Hospital?

Manisha Roy: Twenty years ago it was not very popular. Mclean has been welcoming to my students now for practical training.

Jung predicted as the crisis of life increases in a technological society; Jungian therapy would be more in demand---and now it is happening.

Doug Holder: You have written in “Reckoning Heart: An Anthropologist Looks at Her Worlds.” that culture can offer security, but also can be so confining that we must protest or rebel to survive. Is mental illness a form of this rebellion?

Manish Roy: It is like the case with children. There is a need to rebel unless there is a big restriction. Ideally culture takes care of people. Culture is supposed to take care of people’s spirituality as well as there security. When individuals find there is a clash between their individualvalues and their culture then culture becomes traditional. Individuals break away from it, create something new, and then there are new cultural leaders. Then others follow. This is how culture moves. Freud said this was “discontent” I think it is the natural way of things. When we clash against what we are “supposed” to be doing it can form a neurotic reaction. Jung said every time we have neurotic suffering we also have an opportunity to grow.

Doug Holder: In the “Reckoning…” you write about an experience living with an unhappily married woman and her rather promiscuous lifestyle. You remain non-judgmental and objective. Explain.

Manisha Roy: This was an anthropological book of course. I was an anthropologist before I was Jungian. It is a good foundation to have. Because when you work with individuals; knowing their background, knowing their cultural conditioning, helps in individual therapy. Our job is not to judge, but to help people in emotional pain. By knowing their cultural background helps. People don’t realize how conditioned we are by culture.

Doug Holder: Can you tell me a bit about the Bengali writer’s group you are part of.

Manisha Roy: The name of the group is “Lekhoni,” which literally means the pen, and it also means someone who writes. Some writers, about 8 to 10 of us meet regularly. It’s been meeting for three years now. We try to meet once-a-month. Some people in the group are grateful because they always wanted to write but never did before joining this group.

Doug Holder: Is it a big stretch going from clinical writing to creative writing?

Manisha Roy: It was not easy. I had to unlearn things. In academic writing you have to argue. You have to convince your readers—either prove or disprove something. In creative writing you can let go of that. You can unlearn. My first love was literature. I work with a lot of creative people. Sometimes therapy improves writing.

Doug Holder: Can you talk about the connection between the high incidence of mental illness among writers and artists in general?

Manisha Roy: There are of course some writers who have killed themselves like Sylvia Plath. To create, as any poet knows, you often have flashes that come from a depth. You don’t think them out. When you put it on paper it is different, but the ideas are from the unconscious.Healing comes from the same area of subconscious, as the problems do. Writers and artists sometimes go too close to this area, and it can be dangerous. They are usually more sensitive than other people—they are closer to that area anyway. At some point they think: “I’d rather be a writer, than be quote”sane.’’ But I know there are many sane writers. (Laughs)

OH Don't ,She Said..a poem/song project

( Preview and Purchase--click on pic) Oh Don’t, She Said ~ by Jennifer Matthews. Jennifer wrote this song after her friend and notable poet, Doug Holder, showed her his poem: “Oh don’t, she said, it’s cold.” After reading it, Jennifer felt inspired and heard a song in it. She had to change some of the words to make it work lyrically with the music, but she made sure to stay close to the original poem as much as possible. Jennifer played all the instruments on it and engineered it. It was mixed by Phil Greene at Normandy Sound, who worked with the likes of Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and many, many other noted artists. Doug wrote it after a conversation he had with his mother while riding on a train to New York City. It is dedicated to her, Rita Holder. Genre: Rock: Acoustic Release Date: 2014

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So Spoke Penelope by Tino Villanueva

(Click on picture to order now!) "An intense poetic hovering over a situation of prolonged expectation....The poems in SO SPOKE PENELOPE are simply amazing, whether in the form of an apostrophe to the absent Odysseus or to the Gods, whether in a narrative past-tense mode or in the immediacy of the lived present, whether in the staccato of monosyllables or in the exuberance of unusual compounds, whether they employ Greek-feeling pentameter lines, alliteration, or anaphora. This poetic cycle shows that the whole range of human experience is contained in Penelope of Ithaca."—Werner Sollors

Visitors from around the country and world...( Click on real time view for complete list)

New From Muddy River Books: Eating Grief at 3AM" by Doug Holder

(To order click on picture) “There is a sad, sweet nostalgia in Holder’s Eating Grief at 3 AM, a sense of loss and sadness for the places and the people who were a part of those scenes: the hunchback, the Tennessee Williams’ half lost blondes, the turbaned men and the discarded move nostalgically through life. Yet Holder finds something almost like beauty or knowledge in the abandoned warehouses with weeds crawling to the roof. He imagines when Mrs. Plant, an old art teacher, was an enigmatic young woman ‘feverishly taking notes about the paintings, a love note stuffed in a pocket of her winter coat.’ There are always dreams, even if never fulfilled. There is so often the sense of time passing, of letting go-- letting go of people, letting go of Harvard Square Theater and the Wursthaus, balms that seemed like they would always be there. And they are and always will be in Holder’s moving poems.” — Lyn Lifshin, Author of Cold Comfort (Black Sparrow Press) "

The Dark Opens by Miriam Levine

(To order click on picture) Awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize. “This is a wondrous, spiritually tender book,” writes Denise Duhamel. From Mark Doty: “Somehow these effortless poems manage to be deeply connected to the solid physical world of friends and children, husband and neighbors, but also touch upon an airy, unfettered interiority . . . they are both straightforward and complicated at once, both earthly and awash in a world of light.” Levine’s memoir “Devotion” soon to be reissued in paperback.

Elizabeth Lund Interviews Doug Holder-Founder of the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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With Robert Lowell and his Circle by Kathleen Spivack

(Click on image to order the book) "Please join us for the book launch, Sunday , December 2, 2012--4 to 6 P.M. Co-sponsored by UPNE, the Harvard Bookstore & the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge, MA. Short presentation, lots of refreshments. In 1959, Kathleen Spivack won a fellowship to study at Boston University with Robert Lowell. Her fellow students were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, among others. The book looks at the work of poetry, as well as lifelong friendships, despair, addiction, perseverance and survival, and at how social changes altered lives and circumstances. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, this memoir illuminates the lives and thoughts of some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century."

Please donate to the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene- keep us alive!

(Click on Picture to order) "Starting with Allen Ginsberg and ending with Charlie Parker, Sam Cornish takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the livelier segments of 1950s and early ’60s American culture. With non-stop energy, syncopated rhythms, and a fast pace that keeps you humming as you turn the pages, Cornish visits a wide array of writers, musicians, and films, stopping along the way to visit local poetry scenes and pay tribute to the homeless and poor. Calling on Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis and a host of others, Cornish makes us feel the excitement of those times, even as he and his companions absorb the complex and often disturbing history of what he aptly calls “My Young America.” — Martha Collins

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click on pic for more info.....( Sherill Tippins--"Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel.") " I love your introduction, and fervently hope that Somerville never meets anything like the Chelsea Hotel's fate. It's always a pleasure to read your blog -- even when I'm not in it!" Alan Kaufman ( Editor of the "Outlaw Bible of American Literature")-- " ...a terrific blog..." Perry Glasser--( Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award): " The blog is very impressive." Elizabeth Swados ( Tony Nominated Playwright, Guggenheim Award Winner ): "Thanks you so much for this review on your blog. It helps so much, not just in terms of getting people to know that it exists, but also makes me feel that someone has gotten what I have tried to do. I wish you the very best." Marguerite G. Bouvard, PhD-- Resident Scholar Women's Research Center-Brandeis University: " I love reading your blog. What a refreshing respite from the New York Times. Thanks for all you do for poetry." Ed Hamilton--author of "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" commenting on Chelsea Hotel article: " That's a great piece. Thanks for sending the link along." Richard Moore-- Finalist/T.S.Eliot Prize " I have just read your wonderful interview of the wonderful Eric Greinke!" Steven Ford Brown (Former Director of Research for the George Plimpton Interview Series "The Writer in America"): " You did a great job with the Clayton Eshleman interview, especially the personal stuff. So much better than doing the dry talk about literary polemics." Celia Gilbert (Pushcart Prize in Poetry) "Doug thanks so much for that fine shout out. I'm delighted how you put it all together!" Karen Alkalay-Gut, PhD ( Professor of English-Tel Aviv University) "Doug, I enjoy your posts immensely" Lise Haines ( Writer-in-Residence, Emerson College-Boston) "I love your blog!" "( Elizabeth Searle- Executive Board/Pen New England) : "Like your blog. I like the interview with Rick Moody." Ploughshares Staff- " Everyone at Ploughshares is a big fan of your blog." Suzanne Wise (Publicity Director Poets House-NYC): "Thank you so much for this wonderfully thoughtful portrait of our new home! You really "get us" and you translate that understanding vividly. I love the way you talk about Stanley's ( Kunitz) giant dictionary as a relic from another age. We're glad to preserve such relics." Kathleen Bitetti ( Chief Curator Medicine Wheel Productions/ Former Director of the Artists Foundation--Boston.) " Love your interview with Marc Zegans...wonderful blog!"

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Ibbetson Street is now in a partnership with Endicott College!

(Click on to go to the Endicott College Website)Ibbetson will be supported in part and formally affiliated with Endicott College.

The Arts and Literature in Somerville, Mass.: Off the Shelf with Doug Holder

( Click on picture to go to column) A weekly column in The Somerville News--Somerville's only independent newspaper!

The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 13, 2010

(Click on picture for full article)

ISCS PRESS--WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR BOOK!

Boston's leading co-publisher... (Click on title for more information)

The Boston Globe: Poetic Healing at McLean Hospital

This was the lead article in the Living/Arts section of the Boston Globe. (Feb. 2000) It has to do with Doug Holder's poetry workshops at McLean Hospital and the history of this literary landmark. (Click on pic for full article)

(Click on picture to view) A Production of Somerville Community Access TV's show " Poet to Poet : Writer to Writer." Moderator: Gloria Mindock, Producer: Doug Holder, Director: Bill Barrell

"The Paris of New England" Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

( Click on pic to order this and other Ibbetson Press titles) Interviews with poets and writers from the Paris of New England Somerville, Mass. " Thank you for your interview book. I read it straight through last night and enjoyed it very much...So many good ideas in one book." Eric Greinke-- Presa Press "Very engrossing collection of Holder's interviews, with a wide range of writers about their lives and work. Included are Mike Basinski, Mark Doty, Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Hugh Fox, Robert K. Johnson, and Pagan Kennedy.-- Chiron Review

Advertise with a popular online and print literary column in the heart of the Paris of New England

Reach a wide swath of the Boston Area literary community through The Somerville News' "Off the Shelf" literary Column with Doug Holder. The column is online and in a weekly print edition that reaches 15,000 readers. For more information click on picture.

Grolier Poetry Book Shop

" Poetry is honored every day at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the oldest continuous poetry book shop in the United States. We stock over 15,000 volumes and spoken word CD's. Special orders are welcome. Come and visit us at 6 Plympton St. or online http://grolierpoetrybookshop.org (click on picture)

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Doug Holder/ Founder/ Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Advertise with a popular Boston Area Literary Site--For Low rates-- Contact: dougholder@post.harvard.edu 617-628-2313

Poetry Workshops With Doug Holder

( Click on Picture for Doug Holder's website) Doug Holder has led poetry workshops, both for indviduals and groups for a decade now. Robert Olen Butler ( Pulitzer Prize Winner for Literature) wrote of Holder's work: " I've been greatly enjoying your poems. You have a major league talent, man." Available for individual or groups. Expert in gently helping the novice into poetry and the poetry scene. Reasonable Rates. Available for editing. Call 617-628-2313 for more information. Or email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu

Ibbetson Street Press

No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain by Doug Holder

Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From The Back Bay to the Back Ward by Doug Holder

A poetry collection that deals with Boston, and Holder's experiences working on the psychiatric units at McLean Hospital

Of All the Meals I Had Before by Doug Holder

Click on picture to publisher page...

The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (To order click on picture)

A new poetry book by Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Founder, Doug Holder. "I'm enjoying 'The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel' -- perfect poems, especially in that ambiance." Dan Tobin -- Director of Creative Writing--Emerson College-Boston, Mass./ " It is quintessential Holder& bristles with sardonic wit. Congratulations."-- Eric Grienke (founder of Presa Press) / " I finished "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel'...greatly enjoyed the menagerie of characters and imperfect human beings I met along the way. Excellent work Doug!"-- Paul Steve Stone ( Creative Director W.B.Mason and the autthor of "Or So It Seems.") / "I am reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930's and 40's--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes...Rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection." Pamela Annas ( Asst. Dean of Humanities U/Mass Boston/Reviewer Midwest Book Review) “....particularly liked The Tunnel—a little masterpiece!” Kathleen Spivack ( Permanent Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/American Literature at the University of Paris) "I want to tell you this was just about the best chap I ever read, I absolutely DEVORED it..."--( Robin Stratton--Boston Literary Magazine) "An acclaimed Boston-area poet writes about characters who have captured his interest over the years -- a colonial dame with purple hair, a postal worker ready to be returned to his sender, J. Edgar Hoover's secret love -- in this skillfull collection of short, free form poems." (Perkins School of the Blind Website) Click on picture to access Cervena Barva Press

About Me

Doug Holder is the founder of the independent literary press Ibbetson Street. He teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. He is the arts/editor of The Somerville News, and for the past twenty years has run poetry groups at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. His poetry and prose have appeared in the Bay State Banner, The Boston Globe, The Boston Globe Magazine, Rattle, Endicott Review, Long Island Quarterly, Toronto Quarterly and many others. He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.

Poems From The Left Bank: Somerville, Mass. by Doug Holder

( Click on picture to order) "The poems are full of life, witty and sympathetic and sharp all at once. And most of all, full of an engaged affection for the place and people. If Burns is Scotland's Bard, you are certainly Somerville's..." Kate Chadbourne, PhD ( Lecturer-Harvard University-Celtic Languages and Literature)

From The Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

(Click on picture to order) Interviews by Doug Holder from the Paris of New England: Somerville, Mass. "I am impressed. A lot of great interviews compiled over the years."-- Brian Morrisey--Poesy Magazine / " A very engrossing read..."--Chiron Review / "Doug Holder knows how to ask important questions"--New Pages

Advertise with the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Doug Holder founder says: "Reach a wide audience of poets, writers, editors and publishers, Have your ad linked to your site. The Boston area Small Press and Poetry Scene is well known in the small press community..." For information about rates, etc...email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu or call 617-628-2313